Megafauna Extinction Debate

I thought it was generally accepted that the die off in megafauna over the last 40k was human related?

What about the inverse? Humans expanded to the Americas after megafauna populations were reduced. Its easy to look at things like poaching and assume humans have always been the dominate species. But megafanua like moose or brown bears are still dangerous, even today.

I think your last paragraph contradicts your first one: Most likely, they would not have gone extinct anyway, since similar megafauna in Africa that co-evolved with humans (like elephants) didn’t go extinct despite the climate change.

We don't have megafauna today because our ancestors ate them. Mammoths, Giant Australian birds, giant groundsloths, all disappeared when we showed up.

The humans have shown up many hundreds of thousands of years before the extinction of the megafauna, so these 2 events did not have the same cause.While in the first part of the coexistence between hunting humans and big animals the extinction of various species was more gradual, in Africa and Eurasia, in more recent times the big animals have disappeared almost immediately (at geologic time scales) after the arrival of humans, e.g. in Australia, America and various big islands.During hund

I have a hard time believing the disappearing of the mega fauna is solely due to homo sapiens: if it was the case there should be a few pockets of them remaining in the world.For example in western Europe bears were hunted to extinction before the middle ages, but you can still find bears in Russia and in the US.

"And wildlife": Seems to me this matches the timeframe of the extinction of several North American megafauna species. Those extinctions have been blamed on the arrival of humans; maybe there's another explanation here.

It’s a pretty widespread coincidence. The extinction of Western Hemisphere megafauna correlates quite well with the arrival of humans. Megafauna that has survived to the present day has generally evolved in place with humans (viz, Africa and south Asia).

Because humans wiped out the mammoths, giant sloths, and a host of other megafauna. All those species survived millions of year, and numerous previous ice ages, but had no defense against human hunters. So as each area on earth was colonized by our species, the megafuana were quickly wiped out in that area.I'm from NZ, and we had that event in our recent history. The islands had numerous species of giant birds, but these were wiped out quickly by the first humans who came here, just a fe

Like a lot of mega-fauna a likely cause is humans wiped them out, not that their habitat does not exist. Mammoths only became complete extinct a few thousand years ago.